Role of collective self-esteem on youth violence in a collective culture.

Youth violence involvement has always been the focus of significant research attention. However, as most of the studies on youth violence have been conducted in Western cultures, little is known about the antecedents of violence in the Asian context. Researchers have suggested that collectivism might be the reason for the lower violent crime rates in Asia. Nevertheless, the present study proposes an alternative approach to the collectivistic orientation and violence relationship: The possibility that allocentrism (collectivist tendency at the individual difference level) might shape the meaning of and the attitudes towards violence; thus not all aspects of a collectivist culture serve as deterrents for violence. Instead of viewing it as a random individual act, violence in a collective cultural context could be seen, under certain circumstances, as a social obligation to one's in-group (especially when one's in-group is supportive of violence) and as an internalization of the norms and values of the culture. Thus, the present study investigates the relationship between allocentrism and its relation to violence in a highly collectivist Asian culture, Singapore. We further hypothesized that collective self-esteem might serve as the mediator between allocentrism and the values of violence. Using a sample of 149 incarcerated Singaporean male adolescents, results support the proposed theoretical model whereby collective self-esteem was found to mediate between allocentrism and the culture's norms and attitudes of violence, which eventually lead to physical violence behaviours.